Abstract
The Universal Dependencies (UD) project has created an invaluable collection of treebanks with contributions in over 140 languages. However, the UD annotations do not tell the full story. Grammatical constructions that convey meaning through a particular combination of several morphosyntactic elements-for example, interrogative sentences with special markers and/or word orders-are not labeled holistically. We argue for (i) augmenting UD annotations with a “UCxn” annotation layer for such meaning-bearing grammatical constructions, and (ii) approaching this in a typologically informed way so that morphosyntactic strategies can be compared across languages. As a case study, we consider five construction families in ten languages, identifying instances of each construction in UD treebanks through the use of morphosyntactic patterns. In addition to findings regarding these particular constructions, our study yields important insights on methodology for describing and identifying constructions in language-general and language-particular ways, and lays the foundation for future constructional enrichment of UD treebanks.
Original language | English |
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Title of host publication | 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation, LREC-COLING 2024 - Main Conference Proceedings |
Editors | Nicoletta Calzolari, Min-Yen Kan, Veronique Hoste, Alessandro Lenci, Sakriani Sakti, Nianwen Xue |
Publisher | European Language Resources Association (ELRA) |
Pages | 16919-16932 |
Number of pages | 14 |
ISBN (Electronic) | 9782493814104 |
State | Published - 2024 |
Event | Joint 30th International Conference on Computational Linguistics and 14th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, LREC-COLING 2024 - Hybrid, Torino, Italy Duration: 20 May 2024 → 25 May 2024 |
Publication series
Name | 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation, LREC-COLING 2024 - Main Conference Proceedings |
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Conference
Conference | Joint 30th International Conference on Computational Linguistics and 14th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, LREC-COLING 2024 |
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Country/Territory | Italy |
City | Hybrid, Torino |
Period | 20/05/24 → 25/05/24 |
Bibliographical note
Publisher Copyright:© 2024 ELRA Language Resource Association: CC BY-NC 4.0.
Keywords
- corpus annotation
- grammatical constructions
- treebanks
- typology
- Universal Dependencies